Moules Marinière for French Fridays With Dorie

We haven't been very good members of French Fridays with Dorie. In fact, the last time we participated was back in October of 2012. Mon Dieu!!! In case you don't know, FFwD is a group of food bloggers and cooks who, every Friday, post their experience making and eating a recipe from the amazing Dorie Greenspan's incredible book Around My French Table. So, with every intention of improving our FFwD participation for 2014, we give you a glimpse into this week's "assignment," mouth-watering Moules Marinière.

Moules Marinière is a classic dish from Normandy that is at the very basic level, mussels in an herby white wine broth. We are big fans of mussels, and recently won a Whole Food Market recipe contest for our Curried Mussels with Lemongrass. But we are also big fans of French cuisine, so we were definitely interested in this particular recipe. First and foremost, it looked so delicious, but also, it seemed very very simple to make. Actually, it only took us about 20 minutes, so it's a perfect weeknight meal, rounded out with a side salad and some bread.We could barely believe how flavorful the broth was, especially with the small number of ingredients and the sheer ease of it all.

Now, we can't give you the recipe, because that's part of FFwD rules. The group wants to encourage people to purchase the book and participate in FFwD along with us. To that end, the recipe for Moules Marinière can be found on page 312 (with a gorgeous accompanying photo on page 313!).

Nonetheless, you can see in our photos all the ingredients ready to go. You might notice that we took a couple of liberties. (When do we not?) First, we were only using two pounds of mussels, so we halved the amount of onions, shallots and garlic, but we kept the same measurements for the herbs and broth so we had plenty of it to dip our crusty bread into. Regarding those herbs, we bought fresh thyme because we will use that for other things, but we are tired of buying and throwing away parsley, so we tried a tablespoon of this parsley paste (which will last much, much longer in the fridge), and we felt it worked just as well. Just keep in mind that the mussels should be clean, that is, de-bearded (our favorite market carries them already cleaned, thankfully), and if they are unopened after cooking, don't eat them but discard them or you will pay the price. 

MMMMMmmmmm...Moules Marinière. Magnifique! 

You will be on our French table again very soon.

And just to prove our recommitment, here's a picture of Dorie and Amy (at Wesleyan U's Foodstock in May, 2012)!